The Internet includes a large network made up of a number of smaller networks located world-wide, which are used in personal, commercial, academic, government, and other endeavors. The World Wide Web, sometimes referred to as “the Web” and well known by its initials in the “www” prefixes of many Web addresses, includes an Internet based facility that links documents across remote and local distances.
A “Web page” includes a World Wide Web (e.g., Web) document, which is a coded text file. An address on the Web (or on another Internet facility) is called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), and defines the route across the Internet to a particular file, such as a Web page. A Web site includes a server computer (server) containing Web pages and other files and strives to be continuously online to the Internet.
Portals function as Web supersites that provide users with various services. Such services can include email, Web searching, online shopping, news, directories (such as white and yellow pages functionalities), discussion groups, and links to other sites, among others. Portals organize information thereon into channels, sometimes referred to as “portlet windows.” The information for a channel is provided by a content provider, which is sometimes referred to as a portlet.
Channels can be devoted to or concentrated towards a particular type of information content and may describe the browser window and the information behind it. For instance, channels exist on major portals for bookmarks, email, news headlines, stock quotes, sports scores, etc. Bookmarks provide functionality wherein the addresses (e.g., URL) of certain Web sites are stored for quick and handy access by a user to a favorite or frequently used (e.g., visited) Web site, which can save the user time and effort.
A portal user has limited options for selecting a channel. Once selected, a user can arrange the channel as desired, within limits. Typically, an entity that administers the portal (e.g., a portal administrator) renders a fixed number of channels available to a user of the portal. However, in existing portals only one or a fixed number of each type of channel are available, for example, a single bookmark channel and a single email channel.
For some users, this may not be ideal, or may not adequately meet the user's needs or desires. For instance, consider the user who desires two separate lists of bookmarks, one in each of two separate channels; effectively a bookmark list for each channel. Conventionally, a user requires the intervention and/or manual assistance of the portal administrator to achieve this.
With conventional portal channels, where a user desires two separate lists of bookmarks in separate channels, such as one for bookmarks associated with a project for work and another associated with personal inspirational reading, a user cannot configure the portal to provide this. Instead typically, a user is limited to a single channel for bookmarks.
Thus, bookmarks for URLs associated with the user's professional and occupational interests are typically mixed with those for the user's personal interests, as well. For a user with a large number of bookmarks in several categories, this can be cumbersome. To find the bookmark needed, the user may have to spend time sifting through unrelated bookmark listings. Therefore, some of the time that bookmarking is meant to save may be lost again.
Some portals allow users a feature of creating user-defined tabs or portal pages so as to provide the convenience of placing channels. However, such features do not allow a user to configure more than a fixed number of administrator-configured channels for a particular type of information. In one portal configuration, rich site summary channels (RSS) files exist, which describe Web sites, which can be uploaded in an EXtensilble Markup Language (XML) format, to appear as a channel on a portal page. However, this capability is not generic, in that only RSS files can be uploaded, and this process is cumbersome.